The Washington Post has this pretty sweet time lapse video of the Capitol Building the day of Obama’s Inauguration. Check it out.
⇒ Timelapse: Inauguration Day from the Capitol (Washington Post)

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As the inauguration of our first Black president approaches, let Psalms 146 stand as a reminder for us to place our trust in the One who can truly bring change.
1 Praise the LORD.
Praise the LORD, O my soul.
2 I will praise the LORD all my life;
[...]

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I love looking at NY Times photos. They have a certain sophistication, a sense of subtlety that is matched by few other publications. It’s a testament, not only to their photographers but also to their photo editors. That is the kind of photography I would like to see myself doing in the [...]

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A three-year-old boy called Adolf Hitler Campbell has been refused a birthday cake with his name on it by a New Jersey supermarket.
Heath Campbell, 35, and his wife, Deborah, 25, say they are upset at the decision made by their local ShopRite not to write “Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler” across the cake, and that people [...]

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“I think if we didn’t say ’shortie’ for the next hundred years, I don’t know how that’s going to help things, but I’m just certain that it will.  I just have that feeling in my heart.”
- Mos Def

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A group of college students raises $250,000 for Darfur and looks for an appropriate and impactful way to spend it.
Bell and Hanis’s aborted foray into the world of discount drone shopping was done on behalf of the Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net). Founded at Swarthmore in October 2004 by Hanis and another student, Andrew Sniderman, GI-Net [...]

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In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.
Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment [...]

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Whether you have succumbed to Obamania yet or not, these pictures are quite good. This photographer has been with Obama since before Iowa, and does a fantastic job of capturing those little moments that can be so easily passed over in the hub-bub of it all.
⇒ scout tufankjian (via Shoot the Blog.)

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Unlike the English Whigs and the American Founders, the modern liberal regards suffering not as an unavoidable element of life but as an aberration to be corrected by up-to-date political, economic, and hygienic arrangements. Rather than acknowledge the limitations of our condition, the liberal continually contrives panaceas that will enable us to transcend it.
Barack Obama, [...]

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Imagine if the current crop of public figures had grown up during the Facebook era. We might have photos of John McCain in Florida slurping body shots off his stripper girlfriend. Barack Obama rolling a joint on a beach in Hawaii. George W. Bush passed out at a Yale frat party, 40-ounce beer bottles duct-taped [...]

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He flip-flopped on abortion and same-sex marriage; he is now pro-life and opposes both same-sex marriage and civil unions. However, much of the white evangelical opposition to Mr. Romney is not based on principle. It is simply old-fashioned bigotry – a discomfort with Mr. Romney’s Mormon faith. White evangelicals need to be reminded that this [...]

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Ever since I returned to the United States in 2004 from my last posting to China, as this newspaper’s Beijing bureau chief, I’ve been struck by the breathless way we talk about that country. So often, our perceptions of the place have more to do with how we look at ourselves than with what’s actually [...]

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So I have this fantasy: Suppose that the United States focused less on blowing things up in Pakistan’s tribal areas and more on working through local aid groups to build schools, simultaneously cutting tariffs on Pakistani and Afghan manufactured exports. There would be no immediate payback, but a better-educated and more economically vibrant Pakistan would [...]

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Noble: Federal Judge Ronald Leighton of Takoma, Wash., for fighting legal verbiage with a limerick and the law after a plaintiff’s massive plaint.
Mounds of verbal ballast can mean a win for the rule of lawyers and a defeat for the rule of law. But federal Judge Ronald Leighton prefers justice’s twin handmaidens of clarity and [...]

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Our primary ideological export should not be fear; it should be hope. We are at war with people and their belief systems, and ideas cannot be killed by bullets. They can only be killed by better ideas.
Without a coherent strategy, America’s “war on terror” has been tragically inconsistent. We say that our mandate is to [...]

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